


Simultaneity

by 2bee



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: (kind of), Gen, M/M, Multiverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 02:07:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9101593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2bee/pseuds/2bee
Summary: It all happens at once.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the incredible [Johnlock Fanzine,](johnlockfanzine.tumblr.com) available for purchase [here!](https://gumroad.com/l/ZkvEj) Proceeds go to charity, so why not?
> 
> Series 4 is almost here!!!!! Fucked up!!!! Fucked up!!!

Be not mistaken, for the world has always worked this way. It is all simultaneous.

Think of them not as cracks in the universe, nor as other spaces. Think of time not as a line, but as a box. This truth disguises itself by hiding outside the realm of human perception, but it has always been readily apparent to the keenly observant. And Sherlock Holmes has always been keenly observant. (Do keep up.)

Our story starts, incidentally, at the end. John Watson on the other side of the table, radiant, kiss marks on his neck. They’ve been out visiting Sherlock’s parents. They’re at breakfast, the place Sherlock used to come as a kid. Well. Its ownership had since switched hands and its interior décor is now much more liberal with... _frills._ But John seems to be enjoying it. He’s put a doily on top of his head. He’s pink-nosed and giggly and playing footsie with Sherlock under the table. So they’ll stay. Plus, Sherlock has a sinking suspicion that today is the day. He’s placed himself so he can watch the door.

John orders two breakfasts for himself and a milkshake to share with Sherlock, and in the middle of Sherlock’s order, he runs his foot up to Sherlock’s thigh just to hear his voice crack. John presses his hand over his mouth to suppress his giggle, and when the waitress walks away, he leans forward, biting his lip and pressing his foot into Sherlock’s crotch. Sherlock squeaks. John giggles. Sherlock thinks John may have forgotten that he’s wearing the doily.

John is always like this after their morning shag. Sherlock is sick in love with him. His feelings are vibrant magenta. He kissed the back of John’s knees yesterday. He wants to paint a picture of his own heart using all the colors of John’s body. He can generate the exact shades using what’s its face—HTML. Shades of the inside of John’s lips for his aortic valve. His tongue and cheeks for the ventricles. He thinks this sounds very romantic and is a good idea for Valentine’s day, because it is personal and romantic and unconventional, and year one _is_ the paper anniversary, even though they’re not married, and even if they got married they wouldn’t do it on _Valentine’s day,_ for God’s sake, but he just feels like they might as well get a move on with the paper anniversary because they’ve been love for long enough that they ought to be getting on with some of the more advanced anniversaries, in his opinion.

(The first year _flower,_ however, is a carnation, and Sherlock really does want to save that for their first wedding anniversary, not that they need to get married, because they’re going to be together forever anyway, but—)

This _is_ the day he’s been waiting for.

His nine-year-old self walks through the door.

They make eye contact with each other.

*

By the time he meets John for the first time at St. Bart’s, he has already seen him three times before. The first, at breakfast. The second, at a fair, at 14: from the crest of a Ferris wheel, he spots his older self crashing against the current of slow-moving carnival goers, companion dashing after him. That time, Sherlock memorized the stranger’s elbow patches, his heavy stride, and the color of his hair.

The third, he was 24, getting pissed in a bar in London. The older Sherlock had not been with him, then, but Sherlock was certain of the identity of the man from his future based upon the elbow patches, the heavy stride, the color of his hair, and the way he stared at Sherlock from across the bar, gaze growing hungrier the more he drank, never rising, just watching, while Sherlock sat and stared at the spot just below John’s Adam’s apple where the top button of his plaid shirt strained whenever he swallowed his beer, his lips wrapping themselves around the bottleneck and bobbing down so suggestively that Sherlock thought of nothing else while he wanked for several years (interspersed with the occasional military fantasy, which is only natural—the variety, obviously, and at that age he only let himself wank when he really needed to, anyway, because there were much more important things to be getting on with).

So when he meets John Watson for the first time for the fourth time in St. Bart’s, he is gone before they even begin. It is imperative, naturally, to do everything within his power to ensure that his life continues forward on this course. Closing the loop. That’s all it is, he tells himself.

(He is in love with him by the end of the evening: it is all he can do to pretend that he hasn’t also been in love with him all this time before. That he would love him across universes, in other lifetimes. That he has spent his whole life waiting for him to arrive.)

*

Eight months after Sherlock dies, Mycroft sends him to Scotland. There, hurrying out of a pub in a downpour, he runs headlong into John Watson, two decades his senior. It’s pouring rain. Only upon the sight of him does Sherlock remember that he hasn’t eaten in two days, and is sleeping erratically, and that his John would be so upset with him if he knew.

“Ah,” this John says, hands on his hips, voice warm like butter. “So this is it, then?”

Sherlock is stymied by his appearance: the lines in his face, the grey in his hair, a soft openness that runs over his battered body like bathwater. He wonders if this is all just a beautiful dream, courtesy of morphine, but even so, Sherlock is much more reluctant to discount the testimony of hallucinogenic experiences than the average man. Rainwater soaks his overgrown hair, adhering curling locks to the gaunt frame of his hungry face. He drops to his knees into a puddle. John closes the gap that remains between them and guides Sherlock’s face to rest against his thigh.

Sherlock closes his eyes and sniffs, rubbing his cheek along the fabric: honey, detergent, corduroy, and the rain. Then, John’s fingers run slow and firm through his hair, tugging with only the faintest pressure. Sherlock moans with relief. The zipper teeth of John’s jacket imprint their shape into Sherlock’s hands before he’s even noticed that he’s gripping them.

“You knew I was coming?”

John runs his hand through Sherlock’s hair again. “I was forewarned,” he says, and he sinks to a crouch, hands on his knees. “I was starting to wonder if you’d ever show up, actually.” Sherlock opens his eyes. _John Watson is the sun,_ he thinks. “Now come on,” he continues, giving Sherlock’s upper arms two firm strokes before he twists out of his jacket and wraps it around Sherlock’s shoulders. He wears a wedding ring. “Let’s get you out of the rain.”

 _And the sea,_ Sherlock amends. He sticks his nose into the lining of John’s jacket and inhales. Warmth and sweat.  

A small deck over the bar’s entrance protects the entryway from the downpour, and John ushers him under it until they’re pressed up flush against each other, chest to chest. Sherlock shivers. He supports himself by leaning back against the waist-height bannister.

“You’re a git for being dead,” John says, but he is smiling the way a river overflows and Sherlock’s heart is full of it, “but I’m a git about it when you get back.” He scratches his temple with his index finger, blue eyes wide and sheepish. “We’re both gits, really.”

Every second rips him more thoroughly to pieces. “Practically everyone is.”

John giggles: the same glance down, the same high-pitched whine, the same accordion folds at the edges of his eyes (though time has worn the paths of this John’s wrinkles much deeper).

He wants so much to go home. He wants to see his own John again. It is just as he has always dreaded. Exposure had been his downfall. Sudden abstinence only worsened his condition.

“John,” Sherlock starts, the words all breath, barely audible over the pounding rain. “If I—” he halts. “When I—”

“Sherlock,” John chides, only half preoccupied by the frazzled youth of the new Sherlock, hair absent of grey, shaking like a faun, raindrops clinging to his eyelashes and drawing gleaming lines along the angles of his face, lingering in the philtrum of his puckered lips—“I can’t tell you.”

A glimmer of the proud and indignant Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street peacocks out his chest and raises his chin, flustered. “Why not?!”

Grabbing the lapels of his own jacket, John pulls the fabric more tightly around his young husband. He looks nice in it, though also a bit like an overgrown, drowned poodle. “You forget I’m from the world where this has already happened to you,” John says, and he runs his hand from Sherlock’s elbow to his shoulder, from his shoulder to the bare skin of his neck. “And you told me not to spoil the ending.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “And what? You’re just going to listen to everything I say?”

It happens before Sherlock can prepare. John steadies the far side of Sherlock’s face with his right hand, leans forward, and lays long, soft kisses along Sherlock’s neck, from his collarbone to the underside of his jaw, conducting his assault with tender pressure. Sherlock clings to John’s back, his leg sneaking around to hitch under John’s arse and urge him closer. This makes John giddy again, and he giggles, punctuating his laugher with small, urgent pecks. With his body so near Sherlock’s own like this, he can feel how each spasm bubbles from his belly. He doesn’t want to go on. He wants to stay here, suspended between two places.

“How ’bout I get you something nice and warm,” John says, as if the world can hear Sherlock’s hesitance and has made up its mind to put an end to his haven. John leans back half a step to jerk his head toward the bar’s door.

Sherlock’s fingers wrap an iron grip around the bannister. “Don’t go,” he says.

“It’ll just be a minute,” says John, and Sherlock reaches out and grabs his upper arm.

“Spoil the ending,” he begs.

John’s smirk is closed-mouthed, lopsided. He opens the door to the pub and hangs his head out around the other side of it. “Happy,” he says.

The door closes. John does not come back out. When Sherlock reenters the pub just to check, just to see, he spies only two old women engrossed in chess by the fire and the bartender, all in the exact place where he’d left them, with the exception of the cat-hoarding widow’s advancement to two moves from checkmate.

When Sherlock steps back outside, not only has the rain ended, but the landscape is entirely devoid of puddles or clouds, as if it had never rained at all.

He is still wearing John’s jacket.

*

Such assurances from his future make the reality of their reunion much more difficult to swallow. He worries that something has gone horribly wrong in his timeline. Perhaps he has stumbled through a veil between universes and ended up here: where it was all wrong, where John does not love him, where all roads lead to the identical emptiness of the missed opportunity. A Sisyphus purgatory, condemning him for the selfishness of wasted love.

Worse still, the possibility that he is indeed in his own universe, and he has corrupted it through some fault of his own; he has meddled too much, perhaps his mere awareness—or, worst yet, he could have made up the whole of it. Mycroft has been right for the entirety of their childhood. The pain of loss is the punishment for dreaming.

Even if Sherlock felt inclined to tell Mycroft (he does _not),_ he knows he’d be no help at all. Sherlock’s visions of his simultaneous future would be considered the delusions of the pathetic and the damned. You let him in. You lost. Don’t you feel so foolish, crying over a goldfish?

(Feeling foolish only makes it worse, though he does feel a fool.)

He wishes more than anything to one day hear the sounds of another John up in his bedroom. Sometimes, he curls in his chair and waits for hours. He wants to talk to him. He wants to look at every inch of his body. He wants evidence that John’s presence in Baker Street is not gone. That, like the lasting dust—the intermingling skin cells of their long-dead intimacy lingering on the mantelpiece, the bookshelf, the windowsills—due to the Law of Simultaneity, John is un-loseable. And if Sherlock is lucky, and concentrates very, very hard when the sun is at just the right angle, he can see John in their kitchen again, and pretend, in those fleeting moments, that the rest of their lives had not happened how they did.

When Janine mentions tearing the beehives from _his_ place in Sussex, his grief is a physical ache. _It’s over,_ he thinks. _That was the death of it._

As a result, more morphine.

After that, there hadn’t been much time to mull over the mistakes of his universe.

*

John cannot stop looking at the boy at the other end of the bar. If it were physically possible—which, of course, it couldn’t be—John would swear that he’s looking at a younger version of Sherlock.

His Sherlock (he stutters over this thought, but concludes that there is no better label) awaits him at Baker Street. Moving back in feels more like coming home than John has ever felt, but he’s nervous. He peels at the label on his beer bottle. They’ve been apart for so long, now: what if they’ve forgotten how to be together? What if it wasn’t like before? How could it be?

The boy at the other end of the bar buys another beer for him when he finishes his first. His cheekbones are something marvelous in the club’s purple light.

 _God,_ the thought of Sherlock in his twenties. A frenetic whirlwind of energy and long legs and stupid posh tailored suits and a brain nobody appreciated. Coltish and adrift. The stranger truly does remind him of Sherlock, with long, fidgeting fingers and facial features wearing the same flirty amusement John has seen Sherlock use during so many investigations.

The bartender flirts with the young doppelgänger and grants him a free drink. This annoys John, though he tries not to think too deeply about why.

But he doesn’t want things to go back to the way they were before, does he? That had been half the problem from the start. He closes his tab and leaves. He wills himself some hopefulness for Young Sherlock and the bartender on his way out the door, but he can’t quite manage it, if only because the bartender had seemed a bit sleazy, in his opinion, and Sherlock could do much better, especially looking how he does. Not that the boy had been Sherlock, strictly speaking. But it’s normal to feel protective when—

He runs headlong into Sherlock on the threshold of Baker Street. He looks pale and flustered, pink blossoming over his cheeks. He takes several hurried steps back and starts shrugging himself out of his Belstaff again, hanging it from the coat rack by the stairs. “I was only going—I wasn’t expecting you back,” he says, and John closes the door behind. “I just thought, I mean—you’re welcome to come and go as you please, I wouldn’t want—”

John takes Sherlock squarely by the shoulders.

Sherlock shuts up.

“I love you,” John says. He leans Sherlock up against the wallpaper at the foot of the stairs and watches as the ripples of their relationship wash through him, all the way back to that first night, when he’d cured his limp and they’d fallen against this wall and John had known even then that he’d met the man he’d love forever—he can hear their laughs in echo even now. “It’s always been you. Do you know that?”

Sherlock’s face is the softest John has ever seen it. His eyebrows knit together and his mouth moves through silent syllables while he tries to find the words. “John—” he says.

John kisses him. John kisses him, and they have always been kissing, this echo as present in the stairwell as all the others. The corners of the room, which vibrate their anticipation for this moment through every almost that also passes between their walls, moan with John and Sherlock in relief.

John kisses him, and he kisses him again, and they kiss upstairs and everywhere else until finally they stop kissing long enough for Sherlock to tell John a story of a man he once met in Scotland.

*

Back at breakfast:

Sherlock crosses the restaurant, gets down on one knee, and takes his younger self by the shoulders.

“I know you don’t understand,” and he can feel himself crying, which is funny, but of course he was, “and I know, sometimes, it’s not going to seem like it,” and his smaller self tilts his head to one side, “but _you’re me,”_ he says, and then he points to John, who is watching him. “And that’s your life, over there. Alright? You get to be happy. It’s meant to be.”

The little Sherlock stares at him. “Why should I believe you?” he asks. Sherlock is shocked by how much his younger self reminds him of Mycroft. Surely he grew out of that.

“Because you’re brave,” says Sherlock. “You believe in things.”

In the kitchen, a waitress drops a pile of plates, and when Sherlocks’ attention snaps up at the crash, his simultaneous counterpart vanishes.

Upon returning, Sherlock sidles into the booth besides John. “Who was that?” he asks, wrapping his arm around his shoulders. “Kid you know?” John stabs some scrambled egg onto his fork and holds it out to feed to Sherlock. Sherlock takes it, blushing. He forgets what they were talking about, then he remembers.

“Something like that,” Sherlock replies.


End file.
